Now Obama Wants Biden To Step Down?

In Tuesday's post, I argued that the Democrat problem is the need to maintain an illusion that the New Deal coalition of labor, Catholics, immigrants, Jews and other ethnics, Southern segregationists, and Ivy League gentry is intact, when it has been disintegrating over the past two generations. Both parties basically need white guys to head the ticket, with the Democrats typically nominating a northern liberal for president and for vice president a southern conservative a la Roosevelt-Garner, Truman-Barkley, or Kennedy-Johnson.

This could be switched out, for example Carter-Mondale with a southern president and a northern vice president, and it was the case even with Obama-Biden, with Biden at least thought to be the southern conservative, which he had been in the Senate. It was even arguably the case with Clinton-Gore, although both of them were southerners and centrists while in office. On the other hand, they were both white guys. This at bottom maintained the comfortable fiction of a continuing New Deal coalition, and in the case of Bill Clinton, it was a deliberate contrast with the disasters of the Mondale and Dukakis candicacies.

The problem is that the comfortable fiction is harder and harder to maintain, and the reality is that the Democrat constituency has become greens, radical feminists, parlor leftists, queer theorists, race hustlers, and the urban criminal class, financed by tech and rentier wealth. It basically can't win a presidential election without a credible white guy at the top of the ticket, and that includes Barack Obama, the Ivy-educated child of a white woman and a Kenyan economist who went to an exclusive private school in Hawaii. If anything, Obama was a smoothie in whiteface.

The report now is that Obama is meeting with a cabal of young congressional Democrats:

Former President Barack Obama has hosted a handful of informal, but lengthy private meetings with groups of next-generation House Democrats this spring, I’m told by multiple attendees. The initial session featured the chamber’s new trio of leaders, but he then held subsequent conversations with a range of lawmakers.

Included were progressive members, like Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), as well as more moderate lawmakers, such as Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) and Haley Stevens (D-Mich.).

The gatherings were Obama’s idea, I’m told, and were designed for the now-61-year-old former president to keep current with his party’s rising stars, more than six years after he left office.

According to RadarOnline,

Barack Obama has stabbed his former vice president Joe Biden in the back by secretly rallying congressional support for an alternate 2024 candidate — despite having publicly backed his ex- Veep for a second term.

That’s the bombshell claim behind a new report suggesting the 61-year-old former commander-in-chief was caught red-handed hosting a series of hush-hush meetings with Democratic congressional bigwigs and former administration staffers at his Washington, D.C., office.

“Obama recognizes the gravity of the situation with Joe’s disappointing poll numbers,” said a Beltway insider.

“He had hoped that the president would have rallied and come into his own at this point, but that clearly hasn’t happened.

We don't precisely know what's behind Obama's reported loss of confidence, but we can speculate:

Cornel West’s third-party presidential campaign is stirring up unpleasant flashbacks to 2016 for members of the Democratic Party, some of whom are starting to grow anxious about the effect it could have on President Biden’s reelection.

West, a philosopher, Ivy League academic and leftist, recently announced he is newly registered with the Green Party as he seeks to challenge Biden and the eventual Republican nominee for the White House.

Or this:

Sen. Joe Manchin's planned trip to a "No Labels" event in the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire has some Democrats worried he could mount a "spoiler" reminiscent of late Texas industrialist Ross Perot in 1992.

, , , The senator recently told reporters his participation at the event is not a formal indication of third-party intentions, However, he later added that he's "never ruled out anything or [ruled] in anything... this is strictly a conference we're having."

Or Robert Kennedy Jr:

Far from an exile, he is an extremely well-connected person with unparalleled access to the centers of influence in New York, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C., who either has no idea what kind of fire he’s playing with, or does and is therefore an arsonist.

. . . Lesser threats than Kennedy have played spoilers in elections before, and if he succeeds in helping burn us all to the ground, it will not be because he is an outsider, as he claims, but because of a political and media culture that has protected and encouraged and fawned over him his whole life — handing a perpetual problem child, now 69 and desperate for attention, accelerant and matches.

The problem isn't really Joe Biden, the problem is the disappearance of the New Deal coalition. Manchin represents the strain of moderate Democrat that has largely disappeared from congress and is being kicked to the curb by the new Democrats. Cornel West represents that now-dominant faction, the greens, parlor leftists, queer theorists, and race hustlers who are demanding even more influence. Kennedy represents the Ivy League gentry in the old coalition who are also now being kicked to the curb along with the old-style moderates.

Joe Biden became president in the wake of Hillary Clinton's loss, which might be characterized as Dukakis Lite -- her candicacy was a bait-and-switch, since she had been in the White House already as Mrs Clinton and apparently hoped to succeed in part under the impression she would carry forward Clinton's southern moderate posture, but nobody believed it, and she lost on the basis that she was a radical feminist member of the new Democrat club, and she couldn't cover it up.

So the party fell back on Biden, who'd been preparing to run in 2016. When Hillary lost, his behind-the-scenes argument appears to have been that he could resume the role of centrist unifier. The problem is that nobody at this late date can assume that role, since many of the groups that made up the old coalition, like Catholics, many Jews and other ethnics, labor, Southern moderates, and Kennedy-style gentry, have in some measure left it, and there are no more credible white guys who can run at the top of a Democrat ticket to keep enough of those groups on board to win a presidential election. Biden was the last one.

This is Obama's dilemma. If, per the reports, he wants to replace Biden with a winner, who's the winner? Gavin Newsom? Whom does Obama think can outperform Biden as a Democrat nominee, who needs credibly to represent anything more than the current dominant Democrat faction? I actually think Biden is the only choice. Biden could well lose, but anyone else will lose bigger.